Verse

لَئِن بَسَطتَ إِلَيَّ يَدَكَ لِتَقْتُلَنِي مَا أَنَاْ بِبَاسِطٍ يَدِيَ إِلَيْكَ لَأَقْتُلَكَ إِنِّي أَخَافُ اللّهَ رَبَّ الْعَالَمِينَ

Even if thou stretch out thy hand against me to kill me, I shall not stretch out my hand against thee to kill thee, for I do fear Allah, the Lord of the Worlds. (Holy Quran: 5:28)

Lullaby

Mahmood has a simple yet strong message on his blog- to light a candle in memory of all the Russian children who died. I don’t have a candle to light, but I do have this enchanting and melancholy lullaby to share in memory of all the beautiful and innocent children around the world who had to die in such a horrible way. I also dedicate this lullaby to all the parents who had to bury their children before their time.

The voice is my friend’s voice. We recorded it yesterday.

Listen to it please.

Sky

The sky earlier today was beautiful.

E-mail from an American aid worker in Afghanistan

I received the following e-mail from an American aid worker in Afghanistan and I thought I should share his insightful views in my blog. He writes:

I appreciated the article about "the painful truth". I was living in Uzbekistan during 9/11 and the people I know couldn't have been more kind and sympathetic to us Americans at that time. I noticed though that eventually the stories of it being done by Israel and the fable of all of the Jews not going to work that day started circulating around the country and was believed by some of my highest educated friends. After a while I found that many of them, while still sympathetic to our loss, had reached a justification of the action in their mind, either because of the "Palestinian cause" or the Jewish conspiracy against Islam or something. It was remarkable.

The more I thought about it, I came to the conclusion that since they would never do that and they identify themselves as Muslims, they couldn't imagine any other "Muslim" doing that. I am a Christian and when I hear of a "Christian" having bombed an abortion clinic or been outlandishly rude, I want in no way to be associated with him or her, so my first instinct is to think that the person couldn't really have been a Christian. After all Jesus taught the way of love and mercy and patience and grace.

I welcome the process of people questioning how these things have developed because I think it is the only way forward. I'm in about as conservative of a Muslim country as there can be and would love to see more self analysis by people, but here no one has been trained to "think", but only to do what they are told by the mullah, warlord, their father or husband or brother or whatever. It is sad. I thought it interesting to hear a village mullah one time tell me, "it is strange that we Muslims keep tearing down this village (it was a site of fighting by Mujahadeen), and you Christians then come in and help us."

As an American overseas I'm always trying to evaluate our policies and shortcomings through the different insights I gain from other cultures and peoples. It makes me a bit more of a stranger in my own country, but a more complete person. I hope your stay in Canada is allowing you to see the world through the eyes of a different culture as well.

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I'm trying to plan a trip to Herat for this weekend if I can get a ticket and fighting doesn't break out. Another great historical city which I'm afraid has lost most of its glory, but hopefully I'll see for myself.

I spent most of yesterday exploring how the world was responding to the tragedies in Russia. I'm afraid people as a whole are hard headed and slow to learn lessons from the past. It seems to me that trying to answer "terror" with force is only going to create more terror which requires more "force", etc. The end result is a lot of death and hatred. I read an interesting book that talked about in these situations about how absurd it would be to forgive the perpetrators of the crime. But if you follow the path of unforgiveness to its conclusion you have perpetual war or hatred. Look at Palestine/ Israel, India/ Pakistan, Tutsis/ Hutus, etc., everyone is just in their right for "revenge", which just creates more people with a just cause for revenge. Forgiveness is the only thing that can break the crazy cycle of hatred and killing. So here is to a little more grace and forgiveness in this world!

The other side of the coin

I have to clarify few things regarding my previous post. Even though al-Rashed’s article sheds light on a major source of the problem, which is terrorism carried out by Muslims, he just presents one valid side of a very complicated problem. Blaming Muslims and Muslims religious leaders doesn’t remove the blame from America, Israel, and other countries and it doesn’t make them more innocent or virtuous. America is a major player in the spread of terrorism. In fact America is a terrorist in many ways, as much as those Muslim terrorists are. So if we are keen on understanding the problem and on trying to find solutions for it, we have to acknowledge all sources of the problem. Focusing on one side and ignoring the other doesn’t help… it just creates more confusion.

Now regarding al-Rashed’s article, it certainly fails to present the other different sides of the problem. He focuses on Islamic extremism but fails to mention or even hint at America as being a contributive party in the emergence of this Islamic terrorism and also in committing terrorism in the region. America’s recent invasion of Iraq killed atleast 11,000 innocent civilians. If that is not terrorism, I don’t know what is. And let us not conceal it under the guise of liberation and freedom. Innocent people die by the hundreds and thousands, and so we have a serious problem… humanity in its entirety is in jeopardy.

One more thing I wish to address is death and the view of death in those atrocities we see today and why the American military is not receiving the same kind of stern criticism and repulsive reaction Muslim terrorists do.

I will rely on David Grossman’s analysis in his book On Killing to tackle this issue. In his book, Grossman compares the atrocities of Hamburg (1943) and Babylon (689 B.C.) and poses the question: What is the difference? A valid question to ask today would be: What is the difference between the death caused by the American military and the death caused by the Islamic fundamentalists?" “There is no distinction in the results – in both, the innocent population involved died horribly ..” Grossman answers his question. “The difference is that, emotionally, when we dwell on the butchers of Babylon or Auschwitz or My Lai, we feel revulsion at the psychotic and alien state that permitted these individuals to perform their awful deeds. We cannot understand how anyone could perform such inhuman atrocities on their fellow man … But when most people think of those who bombed Hamburg or Hiroshima, there is no feeling of disgust for the deed, certainly not the intensity of disgust felt of Nazi executioners. When we mentally empathize with the bomber crews, when we put ourselves in their places, most cannot truly see themselves doing any different than they did. Therefore we do not judge them as criminals.”

Today Muslim terrorists are regarded as being more culpable than America because of this psychological factor Grossman mentions. One way of killing should not be glorified over the other. Killing is ugly… killing is bad and especially if it results in the death of innocent civilians and that’s exactly why we have to acknowledge and fight all sources and forms of terrorism for it seems to me that the term “terrorist” has been recently defined by the media as inclusive of only non-governmental entities and guerrillas which happen to be mostly Muslim, as if no western government is eligible of being associated with this term, whether partially or completely and that undermines the process of solving the problem because despite all the great things in America (the nation), America (the government) is responsible for a great deal of the terrorism the world is facing today and that kind of terrorism should be equally feared and denounced.

The Painful Truth: All World Terrorists are Muslims

It’s hard to follow world events nowadays without being slapped in the face, quite often, with news so horrific and disturbing, it makes you both physically and mentally apprehensive, especially as a Muslim.

Horrendous crimes are happening one after the other in so many different places… to so many different people… I feel awkward saying this, but it’s becoming hard to keep track of all of them.

What’s sad and embarrassing is that all these terrorist acts are being committed by Muslims.

I was reading an article written by Abdulrahman al-Rashed in the Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat. In the article, al-Rashed lays the blame squarely on the corrupt religious leaders who encourage those terrorist acts.I took the liberty of translating some parts of the article into English. My translation could be a bit off, so to those of you who understand Arabic, I encourage you to read the original article. (The direct link to the article is not available, you should find it in the archive under sept. 4, 2004) To all others, here it goes:

Unquestionably, not all Muslims are terrorists, but with all sorrow we say that the majority of terrorists in the world are Muslims. The student kidnappers in Ossetia are Muslims. The kidnappers and killers of the Nepali cooks are Muslims. Those who practice rape and killing in Darfur are Muslims and their victims are Muslims too. Those who bombed the civilian complexes in Riyadh and Khobar are Muslims. Those who kidnapped the French journalists are Muslims. Those who bombed the two airplanes last week were two Muslim females.

Bin Laden is a Muslim and Al-Huthi is a Muslim, and most of those who carried out suicide bombings in buses and schools and houses and buildings around the world in the past ten years are Muslims.

What a bad record we have. Doesn’t it say something about ourselves, our society, our culture?

Those images are indeed harsh, shameful, and degrading to us when we gather them and put them all together in one day, but instead of denying and justifying them, we have to first acknowledge their validity and not to garnish articles and speeches claiming our innocence.

After admitting this sickness, it’s easy for us to cure ourselves. Self-medication begins with confession. After that we have to track down our terrorist sons because they are the end-product of our corrupted culture. Listen to what the television sheikh Yousif Al Qaradawi said, he publicly preached the permissibility of killing American civilians in Iraq. Imagine, a religious man encouraging the killing of civilians! A sheikh in his old age encouraging young men to kill civilians while having two daughters studying under the protection of British security forces in the “infidel” UK. How can a father like him confront Berg’s mother whom her son was beheaded because he came to Iraq to work on communication towers? How can we believe him when he says that Islam is a religion of mercy and tolerance if he turns it into a religion of blood?

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Islam is an innocent religion ... It describes killing as the greatest of crimes, and it condemns those who even step on an insect and it rewards those who quench the thirst of a kitten. This is the Islam we knew before the emergence of those fanatics and their campaigns ....

It doesn’t dignify us to have those who take students as hostages, and those who kidnap journalists, and those who kill civilians, and those who bomb buses…associating themselves with us no matter what pain those avengers have faced. They are the ones who disfigured and spoiled Islam.

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